Hot Chicago Nights

Hot saxs. That is what I was after in Chicago. At The Advanced Photon Source, a synchrotron that produces extremely bright, focused, monochromatic x-rays that can penetrate several mm of steel, I was planning on zapping my ceramic coatings inside a furnace at high temperatures to see how the microstructure changes, looking at it using wide, and small-angle x-ray scattering.

This was attempted previously by others in the group, the furnace being basically a tin can with some stuff attached, and it didn't really work out too well. My task was to design a better vacuum furnace for the task. This wasn't so easy as startin this in April after my first visit to the APS meant I was running into Swedish holidays when businesses will be shut from June to Aug, just when I needed stuff done! In the end I found a company, and was set to have the chambers delivered to the US by the 19th of July, when I would arrive and have 2 weeks to put it together and test it and iron out problems.

It didn't arrive. Long story short, it was a week late for no good reason. So my first week, especially the first weekend in Chicago, was spent doing a few touristy things, and worrying about whether I would get any work done at all.

Initially I was 'squatting' in Jon Almer's old house's basement that he had just sold, at the South Loop, close to town. So I took an architecture cruise on the Chicago river, saw the Blue Man Group, jazz trombone legend Curtis Fuller, cycled 25 miles up Lakeshore Drive, checked out Navy Pier, swam a couple of times in Lake Michigan, saw the Beach Boys play at Rivinia - an outdoor music + picnic venue, ate at Hooters ("delightfully tacky, yet unrefined"), had a fantastic steak, overstuffed Chicago style pan pizza, and a great Chinatown meal. Then, for the next two weeks I barely slept and ate Maccas as work and the experiments took over. Some pics:

Sears Tower (bkgnd) and 311 South Wacker (forgrnd). Apparently the cylindrical crown of lights on the top of 311 was so bright when first installed, it affected the migration of birds to Canada who were avoiding the 'sun'.

35 East Wacker (The Jewellers Building), one of the first to have underground entrances so that gangsters like Al Capone could go in and out unnoticed.

Reflections

333 West Wacker

The Chicago Tribune

The 'corn cobs'. Designed to have parking, including boat parking all contained within the one building. I believe these were actually students of Mies van der Rohe, who the master of modern skyscrapers who started his career here in Chicago after coming from Germany. Tthink plain rectangles of just steel and glass, and whos limited English produced the phrase "Less is more".

Lakeshore Dve, expensive apartments based on a previously unbuilt Mies van der Rohe design. Oprah has a floor there.

The Beach Boys, including Jon Stamos from Full House, as a fill in. Rivinia is a massive park, with the stage like the Myer Music Bowl but not visible from the grassy area. So people set up tables, electric eskys, and there were silver service catered group functions there, just listening to the music over the speakers and enjoying the atmosphere. Apparently there are summer concerts there every day over the summer period. Pretty cool. I went with 2 aussies who had a spare ticket - one was a fan, and the concert was pretty good. They sounded like the Beach Boys, and had enough hits so that they could make a medley of some of them. They also did a few covers, and had some bad jokes... all in all what you would expect from a family concert.

OK, so what would Freud say about this building - for the Physchology Dept of Chicago Uni?

Navy peir is a redeveloped area full of restaurants, attractions, markets, cruise boats etc. It was absolutely packed with people, and the wait for a table at some places was over an hour at 3.30 pm.

The Stained Glass museum at Navy Pier - more glass, but of a very different kind.

The Oak St. Beach. It is a bit weird to think of Chicago as a beach city.

It was also really hot and humid while I was there, with the heatwave in other parts of the country being felt up there in the mid-west. It was constantly above 80oF (27oC), even at night-time. And they cant seem to cope! The TV was full of scary heat warnings and public safety announcements like "to avoid the heat, go somewhere cold with airconditioning!". The lake was really warm, nothing like the Swedish lakes.

Two different ways of getting around. Segways are used by some police in tourist areas, and on strongly policed organised tours.

The way I got around. PT Cruiser, in front of the APS reception. Looks good, sounds good, but gutless. The interiors of US cars are also disappointingly plasticky, and it had some stupid features I didn't like. Like needing to double click the button to open passenger doors, and doors that automatically lock once you start the car running. I managed to lock myself out of the car one time when I set the aircon running while I was sorting out some luggage.

A drive-thru bank. The US is more than just car-friendly, it is car-necessity. Walking is impractical most of the time. And there is almost no need to get out of a car, when you can do you banking, or dry cleaning, or pick up your medicine from drive through outlets.


And here is another reason why there is so much fatness. A Chicago stuffed pizza, several cm's thick, half of it cheese. After pulling it out of the fridge the next day the thick thick layer of solid cheese is very unappetising. I prefer the traditional thin crusts myself - in this case in terms of taste, less is definitely more.

Planetarium in distress!


Houeses in an ugly neo-tudor style in one of the leafier areas of Chicago. Big and... just ugly.

A section of the beamline (in the pipe), leaving one hutch with the focusing equipment then entering our hutch where the experimental rig is in place.

The hutch (lab) at the synchrotron where we do experiments. It is locked when the beam is allowed in, to prevent zapping people with x-rays.

The control desk, outside the hutch

The tin can from the previous experiment

The furnace for this experiment

Inside the furnace. Lots of nasty reactions happening around the element and in the refractory. Although prompt delivery of the chamber would not have eliminated all the problems we had with the furnace, beamtime was wasted getting it set up properly, and we would have had a bit more time for the refractory problems (my fault) to settle down and be improved. Hopefully the results aren't significantly affected.

One SAXS image from a run, showing a crossed pattern the Vikings around me have called Thor's Hammers. My next task is to analyse this and 150GB of similar data.